In May 1963, an estimated 2,000 people marched to Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago’s South Side. These protesters included Black undertakers and ministers, as well as NAACP officials. They carried signs: “No Jim Crow in Heaven.” “Discrimination in Life. Segregation in Death.”
In that era filled with civil rights protests, this group of Chicagoans fought to end the racial segregation of local cemeteries. They focused most of their anger on Oak Woods, the largest graveyard in the South Side’s Black neighborhoods. The nonsectarian cemetery had been excluding African Americans since around 1913, when it sent out a circular ad that declared, “Chapel, vault and cemetery are for the exclusive use of the Caucasian race.”
Fifty years later, that racist policy was still in effect, but the Rev. A.R. Leak and other Black undertakers were determined to bring it to an end. “We can spend our money in white stores, buy white people’s merchandise and pay white people’s taxes, yet we cannot be buried with them or cremated in Oak Woods Cemetery, a graveyard located in the heart of a Negro community,” Leak said on the day of the protest.
Chicago is notorious for its long history of segregation. For decades, prejudice prevented African Americans from living in the city’s white neighborhoods, with boundaries enforced by real estate tactics — redlining and restrictive covenants — as well as violence. But segregation was not limited to the living: The area’s cemeteries were also divided by race, as far back as the Civil War era. Through protests and legislation, cemeteries gradually changed their policies.
Prejudice “follows us to the grave”
In 1864, Chicago’s most prominent Black resident, a prosperous tailor and passionate abolitionist named John Jones, declared, “I assure you, fellow-citizens, that to-day a colored man cannot buy a burying lot in the city of Chicago for his own use.” Jones made that assertion in an 1864 pamphlet denouncing Illinois “Black Laws,” which restricted African Americans’ civil liberties. State laws and city ordinances didn’t limit where Black people could be buried, but Jones said a pervasive prejudice “follows us to the grave.” A year after the Chicago Tribune published Jones’ pamphlet decrying the Black Laws, state legislators repealed them.
Jones later served as a Cook County commissioner, becoming the state’s first African American to win an election. When he died in 1879, he was buried in Graceland Cemetery, which was outside Chicago’s city limits at the time. Although the surrounding neighborhoods have been overwhelmingly white for most of their history, Graceland is the resting place for a number of Black people who died in the 19th and 20th centuries, including heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson and U.S. Rep. Oscar Stanton De Priest…